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The Old Camera

The old camera is in fact a gift I recieved back in 1979 or 1980 from a friend of my father. All these years it has been sitting in a glass cabinet in my living room, gathering dust. Of course I dusted it off, every once in a while, thinking about how to get it back to life again and maybe take a few pictures with it.

Well, I actually took a couple of images with it many years ago, when I still had an operable darkroom. The results were so-so, because I had no glass plates that were required I used sheet film, which did not really work.

Anyway, I always liked that little camera that was built some time in the early 1920s. In 2015 I started taking pictures of it, just for fun and to see what I can do. I took quite a number of photos, but finally distilled 12 images, that I turned into an A4 size folio, printed on Hahnemühle PhotoRag Baryta glossy paper (305 grams / m2), including a cover sheet with a story of the company that made the camera. To keep the prints together I made a folded folio cover out of grey heavy art paper (300 grams / m2) that you see below. It works pretty much like an envelope, but requires very precise folding, so it fits properly.

The folio concept is not my own idea, in fact I picked it up a couple of years ago from Brooks Jensen, publisher of LensWork magazine. I found it to be a great way to "finish off" a photo project consisting of 5 to 20 images--too few to turn it into a book project.

Old things seem to have a life of their own. To me they breathe some spirit of the past and maybe host something like a "ghost in the machine"... creepy...